The One Percent Doctrine
What is the guiding principle of the world's most powerful nation as it searches for enemies at home and abroad? Who is actually running U.S. foreign policy? The story begins on September 12, 2001, as America began to gather itself for a response to the unimaginable. Journalist Suskind tells us what actually occurred over the next three years, from the inside out, by tracing the steps of the key actors who oversee the "war on terror" and report progress to an anxious nation; and the invisibles, the men and women just below the line of sight, left to improvise plans to defeat a new kind of enemy in an hour-by-hour race against disaster. The internal battles between these two teams--one, the Bush administration, under the hot lights; the other, actually fighting the fight--reveal everything about what America faces, and what it has done, in this age of terror.--From publisher description.
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What Hacker News says
- In this case, the rot had spread from the top. There aren't really any formal organizational remedies for that, beyond changing the regime at the top. Check out the first two pages of the preface to The One-Percent Doctrine (http://books.google.com/books?id=gV3m6sYhnrsC&printsec=f...)
...at an eyeball-to-eyeball intelligence briefing during this urgent Summer, George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice. He looked hard at the panicked CIA officer. "All right," he said. "You've covered your ass, now." - The problem with that, from the perspective of the instigators of the "War on Terror," is that you don't get to show off what a big dick you are when you pull off an effective intelligence operation. Suskind's book The One-Percent Doctrine is very revealing in this regard. There were effective intelligence operations against Al Qaeda, but the fruits of them were repeatedly squandered for egotistical reasons. In one case, the CIA decapitated the main financial institution used by Al Qaeda and put their own guy in charge of it. This really shone a light on Al Qaeda endeavors for a time, but the US government kept giving the insights they gleaned from it to the Israelis (with no obvious quid pro quo) and the Israelis kept using those insights to solve their own internal problems until people twigged and started finding more secure ways to move their money around.
- > I wonder how much of the authoritarian tendencies of the government of certain countries (e.g. Russia, China, Iran) is driven by a desire to maintain the stability and control presumably needed to resist hostile actions by the US empire that ironically professes freedom and democracy.
There is a really interesting passage in Ron Suskind's book 'One Percent Doctrine' about the 2004 release of Bin Laden video, released four days before the US presidential election (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Osama_bin_Laden_video). The intelligence consensus was that this was released to help re-elect Bush, as the Bush-led US gives legitimacy to Al Queda's actions as much as much as Al Queda's actions legitimize US war on terror.
edited: corrected the book reference.
- "morals have no scientific foundation"
Your consequentialist philosophical views also have no "scientific foundation". Science reveals the world as it is, not as it should be.
You claim that somehow you are beyond values by applying this crude calculus of "lives saved". The truth is that you have not provided a foundation for your ethics. So what is it?
I agree that you do not understand what I'm getting at. Maybe we should just table this.
edited to add:
"what exactly has been justified by the "ticking time bomb" experiment?"
If you read The One Percent Doctrine, you will learn about the people the United States tortured to try to get intel about terrorist attacks, using the ticking time bomb justification. And hello, "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." We invaded Iraq using similar justifications about the risks of WMD.
